The two great challenges of a new journalism

(Translated from a Portuguese original text using Google Translator.)

The two most distressing dilemmas of contemporary journalism are the question of financial sustainability and the complexity of the relationship between professionals and the community of readers, listeners, and users of social networks. The shock caused by the introduction of digital technologies in the journalistic routine has already been absorbed in most informative projects. Another obstacle to the digitization of newsrooms is the adaptation of professional routines to the multimedia production of narratives. This issue hasn’t been solved, so far, not for technical or cultural problems but for financial reasons.

The financial sustainability of a journalistic project in a digital environment is an unsolvable puzzle both in large companies and among individual bloggers and influencers in social networks. There are, of course, corporations and individuals that have achieved stability between income and expenditure, but these are still exceptions in a journalistic scenario marked by an immense cemetery of projects.

The first major obstacle in the pursuit of financial sustainability lies in the fact that it will hardly be achieved without taking into account three other crucial problems:

1) Engagement with the target audience through loyalty strategies,

2) The production of journalistic narratives in tune with the type of people to be reached by the informative project;

3) The income level of individuals participating in the target audience;

This structural interrelation between sustainability, engagement, and narratives is a relatively recent finding among online journalistic entrepreneurs. But it is also a great challenge because it introduces the issue of complexity into professional routines. To achieve sustainability, you need to have income. To have revenue, you need to have a product that the public needs and likes. This ends up demanding what is conventionally called information literacy, a minimum of knowledge about how to read the news, how to suspect lies, and how to check facts and data. The best resource for achieving this literacy is the close, lasting, and interactive relationship between journalists and their target audience.

As you, the reader may have already noticed, we are facing a complex situation where one thing depends on the other, without it being possible to say that one is more important than the others. Professionals, in a digital journalistic project, will need to develop the skills and competencies necessary to deal with the complexity of social communities, that is, take into account the group and the individuals as separated but integrated entities.

This brings us back to the question of sustainability and engagement, because these are, currently, the two journalistic challenges with the most significant lack of data and techniques for investigating reality. Skipping steps, it can be said with some degree of security that in the financial matter it is only possible to have a single solution for some cases. This is because setting up a financial revenue system will depend on the average purchasing power of the target audience, the existence of some kind of public or private funding, and the presence of advertisers, to mention only the most common cases. This information will basically be obtained through research as realities will inevitably be different and specific. Therefore, each project will end up having to create its own revenue-raising model.

Engagement is even more complex because it will involve people, therefore it will require minimal knowledge about human relationships, an understanding of the social dynamics in a community, ideological tolerance, and persistence in the face of eventual collaboration refusals. Here too, it is almost certain that there will be a need for a lot of research to adapt engagement strategies developed in other places and countries to the reality of the project. This is all going to take some time for journalists and communities to become partners in information production and financial sustainability.